Case Number 25643: Small Claims Court

PHILIP ROTH: UNMASKED

The Charge

"In the coming years, I have two great calamities to face: death and a
biography. Let's hope the first comes first!" -- Philip Roth

The Case

No such luck. Philip Roth: Unmasked (which premiered as a March 2013
episode of the PBS American Masters television series,) finds the literary lion
very much alive, and still virile on the eve of his eightieth birthday.

Even better, the lion is roaring. About his life and his work (if one can
imagine them as separate entities -- Roth doth protest too much that his fiction
isn't autobiographic!), about marriage, divorce, death, politics, debilitating
physical pain, his influences, his failures, and even his successes; all with a
rapier wit, a glass-smooth deadpan, and an endearingly authentic
self-deprecation.

What I found most striking and most surprising about him during the course
of this fascinating documentary was Roth's seemingly genuine "just another
mensch" affability -- this man won the National Book Award for Fiction (with his
first novel, no less!), the Pulitzer Prize, and just about every other citation
of merit the literary world has on offer. Wasn't he one of the dreaded,
egg-headed "New York Intelligentsia?" Had he forgotten his tenure as a writing
instructor at the venerated University of Chicago?

Where was the sex-crazed intellectual pornographer? Where was the
Anti-Semitic, self-hating Jew?

These were some of the choice epithets being hurled Roth's way in the days
immediately following publication of "Portnoy's Complaint," his fourth, and
best-selling novel, in 1969. An angst and lust-ridden confession by one
Alexander Portnoy from the couch in his psycho-analyst's office, this dark comic
masterpiece made the author a household name and a fugitive from celebrity at
the same time.

"The New York Times had interviews of my high school teachers, can you
imagine?" Roth recalls. "There were television programs -- six Jewish mothers on
to talk about my book...and me!"

"I got literary fame, sexual fame, and even madman fame! I had lots of
opportunity to ruin my life."

Fortunately for the rest of us, Roth chose instead to keep working, and
though he recently announced his retirement after over a half-century of toil,
those closest to him (including longtime friend and neighbor Mia Farrow, who
supplies a great deal of information here) know better than to take him at his
word.

Aside from enlightening and unobtrusive cameos by some of the author's
childhood friends and a cabal of today's brightest young literary voices
(Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss and Nathan Englander), documentarians William
Karel and Livia Manera wisely keep their cameras where they belong, and this
attention to detail is echoed by a sterling anamorphic widescreen presentation
from PBS with crystal clear Dolby Digital stereo sound to match. English SDH
subtitles are available, and for those who don't want the party to end so soon,
there are extended interviews and readings by Roth from his own canon.

Though never reclusive on the order of Salinger or Pynchon, the New Jersey
born novelist has, before now, generally preferred to put it in writing,
effectively eschewing the limelight. And while Philip Roth: Unmasked is
by no means a glitzy, gala affair, it's most likely the closest you'll ever come
to an intimate encounter with an (alleged) intellectual pornographer.